WINTERSPRING

This 'Winter' has been so Springlike that I've been Springy myself , which isn't to say that I've been prancing barefoot around the mountainside in a toga with a laurel wreath on my head, tootling a panpipe with one hand while flinging flower petals with the other, but you get the picture-- though perhaps you'd rather not, I'm not really the one to judge the aesthetic aspects of a buff 67-year old foreigner tootling about a Japanese mountainside in a toga flinging flower petals, which now that I think of it might well be in violation of several local laws on various aspects of public peace and decency, to say nothing of visa extensions, but like this bizarre tangent of mine, that's neither here nor there… Now where was I... oh yes: WinterSpring.

The Springy things I spoke of included planting seeds in sunwarmed soil, uncovering the tented spinach so it could bask in the Miami sunshine that shone in mid-January and raking the mounds of oak leaves from my upmountain neighbor's lawn (I'll use them for compost). What's more, as night falls it feels almost unnecessary to gather more than an armful of firewood...

Then last night at around three a.m. my deep sleep was torn to fragments by a long savage blast of howling wind from the north, a Siberian beast that ravaged through the trees and roiled around the house until dawn came the silence, when I got up and looked out and beheld what looked like fog but was snow, and each tree around the house had been sliced in half vertically: the north side of each trunk and its larger limbs were caked thickly with windblown snow, and invisible against the white background. Winter had arrived on loud white feet and begun its elegant trickery...